FeNAs: a fuzzy e-negotiation agents system

As e-commerce becomes common a large number of Internet-based systems has been developed to assist users in different aspects of electronic trading. In particular systems that use software agent technologies are proving to be effective in supporting and automating various stages of the trading process (e.g. product finding, supplier finding, product ordering, delivery monitoring etc). More recently software agents have successfully been introduced to support and/or automate negotiation in e-commerce (e-negotiation). Examples of such systems are Kasbah, AuctionBot and Tete-a-Tete. The purpose of such systems is to find a mutual agreement on the terms of transactions that satisfies all parties’ constraints, preferences and objectives. Most of agent systems can negotiate on behalf of users based on auctions and other forms of competitive negotiation according to the users’ instructions. Some systems can handle aspects of uncertainty associated with incomplete information about other parties. However they typically assume that all information available is precisely defined. For example they usually require the users to provide exact and precise information about their private preferences, constraints and objectives (e.g. price < $99, delivery time = 1 day, etc). Because most real-world negotiation problems can also involve preferences and constraints that may be imprecisely defined (eg. low price, high quality, short delivery time etc) negotiation agents that can also consider imprecise information may be needed.